Our rocket sitting on the pad waiting to launch (far left)

Time (seconds) vs Altitude (meters)

3D view of flight profile

Saturday 1/18/14 marked the first time the S4 payload had been flown on an ‘over the counter’ model rocket motor. The launch was attended by myself (Kevin John) and Ken Biba. We flew a couple of different airframes, including a lighter, off the shelf airframe flying on an F-40, and a larger custom made airframe flying on a G-80. The included data is from the G-80 flight, which reached a maximum height of about 807 ft. Had it come off the rail a bit straighter, it would have made it to about 880 ft.

This also marked our first test of our new communication protocols which replace TCP communication for UDP communication. If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, what it means to you is that we no longer have to worry about our payloads loosing connection and stopping data collection. It’s a big improvement to data efficiency and speed as well.

We’ll be getting in touch with our teachers on how they can get their hands on one of these new low powered rockets soon, as soon as we get our Spring shipments of payloads lined up.